View your students’ non-academic impacts

Not at Shmoop—although we understand the confusion. It makes sense that people would hear a term like “social-emotional learning” and wonder whether students would be learning how they were “supposed to” feel or interact with the world, but in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Heartbeat is a place for students to reflect on their own unique social and emotional experiences and consider how those aspects of their lives relate to their experience at school. In other words, students use Heartbeat to learn about themselves as they are right now, not who somebody else wants them to be.

We agree—that’s why no teacher or administrator ever has access to your student’s specific answers to any question in Heartbeat. Only your student knows what they answered for each interaction. What’s more, our questions don’t focus on specific details; instead, we ask students to reflect on how they react to and feel about the various nuances of their lives. Teachers only see generalized insights that mirror the student insights.

Beyond that, we can all agree that many of the most important parts of a student’s life take place outside of the classroom, yet all of those parts work together to affect a student’s academic performance. For instance, it might not be obvious why we’d ask (or care) if a student listens to loud music, but did you know that 1 in 5 American teenagers experiences some degree of hearing loss? So this seemingly unrelated extracurricular activity can have a direct impact on a student’s ability to hear their teacher and concentrate in class. Every question in Heartbeat is tied to factors like this, and we clarify how each factor is connected to academics in the Insights students see on their Pulse.

We know not every student will relate to every single question in Heartbeat, and that’s okay. However, it’s important to remember that every question will relate to someone. Considering how another student’s life might compare to their own is a great way for students to practice empathy. Even more importantly, if students don’t want to answer a particular question, they don’t have to. Students are never required to respond to any question in Heartbeat; they can skip any questions they aren’t interested in answering and move on to questions that feel more relevant to their lives.

Using Heartbeat requires minimal class time–in fact, Heartbeat requires no class time at all. More importantly, Heartbeat While SEL is often perceived as a supplemental, extracurricular add-on to core academic learning, Heartbeat presents students with questions and insights in areas directly linked to academic development. Everything a student learns in Heartbeat directs them back to strategies for academic success.

Heartbeat does not tell students how to act or feel. Nor does it present values instruction. Rather, Heartbeat is driven by student choice. To that end, Heartbeat provides student-directed exposure to the factors and issues students consider most relevant to their learning, then equips them with awareness and insights that enable them to make informed decisions about how to effectively and successfully manage and execute their learning.

Heartbeat provides a student-directed and student-centered learning experience: Students choose which topics they consider most relevant and meaningful to their learning, then build on that knowledge to more effectively communicate and partner with teachers to improve their academic performance.

Heartbeat demystifies the confusing rhetoric that so often obfuscates SEL and its core benefits for learning. Instead of acronyms, Heartbeat breaks each dimension of learning down into precise and specific insights into the factors that impact student learning.